Last year over a billion accounts were exposed over internet and every year hundreds of millions of accounts are compromised in various acts of cyber-crimes. A report by Gemalto claims that more than a billion accounts were compromised during the year 2014. The report also highlights a shift in tactics by cyber criminals, traditionally cyber criminals targeted credit card information; but more recently, the aim is found to be identity theft. Stolen identities can then be used for various malicious activities like registration of fake credit cards, sold to marketers or creation of fake accounts.
For example, people usually tend to use the same identifier and password for various portals. Therefore, if the account information has been compromised once at one particular portal, there are chances that the stolen or compromised information can be used multiple times on various other portals. Hence, the confidentiality, concealment and privacy of email identifiers along with passwords is important. If any of these is leaked or compromised, the account is considered a compromised account.